MAPS AS PRACTICE INSTEAD OF A REPRESENTATION

In the western world, we are very used to maps. We use them all the time: they help us get from one place to another; they help us find our way through unfamiliar terrain, locate people, objects and events. They have helped us plan, predict and understand our world. What if maps are more than what cartography has been telling us they are?

Historically we think of maps from a certain perspective. This maintains the hierarchical attitude about who makes the map, who owns it, and the power that comes with. This attitude delegates the power of the map to an elite group of experts, who are in charge to capture and portray spatial data accurately. By default, these structures reinforce the power of hegemonic institutions over local people, lands and other resources.

We often forget that the conventional appearance of maps mirrors social and political decisions and contain a bias: they express a point of view and indicate property lines, postal districts and enterprise zones. They are always biased in the sense that “they project the interests of their creators,” as Wood states in “The Power of Maps” (Wood and Fels 1992).

Maps are not ontologically secure representations nor neutral products of science, they carry a long tradition of conventions and principles that reinforces the dichotomy of the cartographer as a skilled professional who make judgments that privileged discourses and relies on the map as a container of the “truth”, subjugating other kinds of knowledge. And then we have the user or interpreter of the map who is responsible for its depiction by his limited skills and knowledge.

If you think about it, maps are never fully formed, nor complete. They are more like living documents, transitory and fleeting. They are contingent, relational and highly context-dependent. A map is about spatial practices enacted to solve relational problems.

Take for instance this hypothetical example:

Imagine a group of social scientists that have been given the task by a government agency of reporting on the distribution of population in informal settlements in Mexico City between 2010 and 2018. Given the spatial nature of the problem, producing what is commonly understood to be a map provides one viable solution over a variety of potential solutions to this problem. They have to construct a spatial representation using available data that conform to the agreed standards and conventions and which effectively communicates the pattern of population change.

Starting from a position of having specialized tools and resources, and certain degree of knowledge, experience and skills, they work toward the process of mapping. The map emerges through a set of iterative practices of employing certain techniques that built on other’s previous works or standardized forms of representation. This process is choreographed to a certain degree, shaped by the scientific culture of conventions, standards, rules, techniques and philosophies but is not determined and essential. The map is contingent and relational in its production through the decisions made by the team with respect to what attributes are mapped, their classification, the scale, the orientation, the colour scheme, labelling, intended message, and so on. The fact that the construction is enacted through affective, reflexive, habitual practices that remains outside cognitive reflection. The team “plays” with the possibilities of how the map will become, they experiment with different colour schemes, different forms of classification, and differing scales to map the same data. Making maps then is inherently creative and maps emerge in process.

While all this decisions and actions might seem trivial, this culmination of a set of practices– creates a spatial representation that they understand as a map and believe that others will accept as a workable map based upon their knowledge and experience of what constitutes a map. Finally, when this spatial representation that the group understands as a map is printed to show to the government agency required, we would argue that their creation is not complete, although it has the appearance of what Bruno Latour (1986) calls an “immutable mobile” with its knowledge and message fixed and portable, and it can be read by anyone understanding maps language, it remains mutable, remade every time it is employed. Their creation is not ontologically secure as a map because it is being transformed by the inhabitants living those places that continue to grow in those settlements, or the state worker that would take a decision regarding a new policy based on that data. Individuals transform the spatial representation created by the team, into a map. Each person engaging with a spatial representation brings a different map into being, framed by their individual’s knowledge, skills and spatial experience. For someone who does not understand the concept of thematic mapping or classification schemes, again the map will be bought into being differently to people who do, who will ask different questions of the data and how it is displayed. There is variability in the ability of people to mobilize the representation and to solve particular problems. Moreover, the recognition of the map generates a new, imaginative geography for each person.

In this paper we share how embracing this point of view of maps as processual instead of representational devices and reimagined them more like unfolding activities brought into practice in an embodied, social and technical way. Kitchin, Perkins and Dodge, (2011), provide a mix of creative, playful and tactile tools to support a participatory mapping initiative, considering the experience knowledge and skills of local inhabitants of three communities in the West Mountain Region of Mexico City. The experience of creating a map as a collective, made them conscious of their memories and heritage, linked to their natural resources, made them reflect on their own identity and knowledge and mobilized toward more organized and purposeful actions.

The West Mountain Range of “Las Cruces” comprises one of the last forest areas surrounding the Mexico City megalopolis. Five original indigenous¹ towns settled formally in 1860 as the District County of Cuajimalpa and have been living in a direct relationship with their environment and close to their traditional knowledge and religious rituals. Their main activities were agriculture (collected mushrooms and wood from the forests surrounding them), a locally cultivated “pulque”² alcohol, and coal production. Unfortunately, various modern pressures on their environment including real estate development, different agrarian regimens, forest closures and corruption has resulted in significant deforestation and river pollution.

The government has attempted partial solutions but have not gained much traction. There is a long history of negligence, inefficient water collection systems and unsustainable programs for river and forest protection. A lot of these settlements are informal and do not have sufficient drainage channels, and the ones that do, are poorly maintained, causing redundant water leaks that bring untreated waste to the underground soil and rivers. There is a partial conservation plan that very few know about or respect. There are also different levels of land tenure, meaning that ownership issues have forced inhabitants to sell their lands to private property, or even relocation to more dangerous areas.

This is the common context that these original towns find themselves in today that constitute the “peri-urban forest belt”. The reality is that they are slowly being consumed by urban expansion. The natural resources from these forests are diminishing, yet are still essential livelihood for many, though cared for only by a few, causing many disturbances and conflicts between these communities.

In this context, our academic research team of designers and social scientists worked in collaboration with the Environmental and Territorial Ordinance Procurator’s Office (PAOT). We decided to co-create a Natural Resources Catalogue within three of these communities considered original towns in the city: San Pablo Chimalpa with 151,127 inhabitants; San Mateo Tlaltenago a communal agrarian organization with 14,168 inhabitants (80% of their territory is part of “Desierto the Los Leones” National Park); and Santa Fe Town, (one of the original hospital-towns founded by missionary Vasco de Quiroga in 1583, it is actually a collection of neighbourhoods belonging to Alvaro Obregon’s district). All these original towns preserve a strong traditional representation of the people in front of the governmental structures we call “Delegations”, which responds to the urban logic of the city and its government nowadays. The relationship between the socio-religious-parental structure and traditional forms of community governance groups called “comunas” had been historically very strong and opposes new ways of government planning and authority which has generated slow processes of transformation in these towns (Portal and Sanchez Mejorada 2010). Since there are very few formal land planning records of the territory from the authorities, and the sources of existing spatial information have many discrepancies and are not public, we decided to pursue a participatory cartographic approach with the purpose of starting to develop a common planning and decision-making activity in the city.

Participatory cartography has been considered a fundamental instrument to help marginal groups represent and communicate their needs within the territory and augment their capacity to protect their rights. (IFAD, 2009). We decided to carry out this initiative as an alternative to empower the community, who have vulnerable backgrounds, are threatened by landfills and other conflicts related to land access and ownership. We also realized that community mapping initiatives can easily fail or even end up being counterproductive, especially when government agencies use the map made by locals, as evidence to favor their points without really considering community needs or voices, causing even more conflict rather than using them to pursue intelligent and balanced negotiation and planning.

Our goal was to include as many stakeholders as possible to better integrate local knowledge and direct experiences from the lived community environments. For this we needed to engage relevant stake-holders, like the community leaders or the women in charge of managing the rural laundries or “lavaderos” who have lasted from the colonial period and still represent a traditional way to use natural resources for the community. If we had only relied on tools like geographic information systems technology (GIS), we might be limiting the ratio of engagement to just a few people besides our research team and some specialists (Canevari-Luzardo et al. 2017). We needed to pursue a novel way to target and co-produce local knowledge, so we undertook a study about walking trails that incorporated interviews with the community leaders and developed a generative toolkit (Sanders and Stappers 2012) that supported map making through workshop sessions with a variety of participants and a followed them up with an observational guidebook to be distributed among other neighbours that could not attend the workshops. The design and planning of these generative methods are based on a relational design approach to human agency, called Agency Sensitive Design (ASD) which is based on Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and Activity Theory (AT) framework to develop a relational understanding of built environments. ASD approach suggest a new pragmatic design practice where a more inclusive mind set prevails in favour of more emergent and fluid actions over the prescriptive and controlled control attempt to predict actions. (Kocaballi et al. 2011). Baki Kocaballi and colleagues (2011) suggest six qualities that characterize this relational design approach, built on their analysis of recent developments with situated and embodied perspectives in interaction design field, which we considered to develop the tools for participatory mapping toolkit. We were also inspired by the Argentinian collective Iconoclasistas, which have achieved great activists results for Latin American communities. (Ares and Risel, 2015). Within their own style, they have approached mapmaking as a practice, adapted a set of tools to organize mapping workshops, concentrating their efforts in the creation of a set of questions, and icon templates to easily identify major problems.

The study offered an opportunity to test how a processual approach to mapping using generative tools designed with consideration of relational aspects of agency, could trigger different levels of collaborative action in the context of participatory cartography. This new approach helped the three communities to increase legitimacy of the mapping process and led to incorporation of local actions. Interestingly, for two of the communities in the study, those with a more cohesive social and land organization with strong hierarchical and patriarchal distribution of labour, this approach gave women more voice and recognition in the decision-making process within the working groups.

The information generated by the community supported the decision-making process grounded in participation as well as encouraged better cooperation in knowledge co-production between scientists, societal actors and decision-makers. It also informed the designers with a more inclusive way to understand and categorize natural resources and was a key aspect for the interface design of the platform, which is being worked on with some younger members of the community.